A Chinese influencer with a huge global following and endorsement by the Communist Party is back on the internet after a three-year hiatus.
Famous for her idyllic videos of life with her grandmother in a village in Sichuan province, the 34-year-old has posted three videos since Tuesday – and they have already been viewed millions of times.
Li first rose to fame in 2016 when China's growing social media users found solace in her slow-paced videos about cooking and traditional crafts.
His return, welcomed by fans around the world, comes in a context of government repression against influencers whose content they consider “inappropriate”.
Li's hiatus followed a dispute with the agency that handled his accounts. In late 2021, she filed a lawsuit against the company for the rights to her brand and stopped uploading new videos. They settled in 2022, but Li didn't return to the internet until Tuesday.
In recent months, several influencers have disappeared from the Chinese internet as authorities have stepped up efforts to “rectify” online culture by targeting people accused of tax evasion, spreading misinformation and displaying wealth.
But Li is among those who survived official censorship. His huge following on YouTube and TikTok, which are banned in China, has led to questions about whether his videos amount to soft propaganda.
She certainly seems to have the approval of the Party. The official Xinhua News Agency published an interview with her the day after her return. It is rare for state media to interview influencers.
In the interview, Li said she had spent the past three years “catching up on sleep” and taking her grandmother to see the “outside world.” Now, she added, she has “a higher goal” and would do “her best.”
Li has always been a darling of state media. Xinhua called her “a vlogger who amazes the world with Chinese rural life” and China Daily praised her for “spreading Chinese culture to the world.”
For Beijing, Li's pink videos encourage tourism and echo President Xi Jinping's call for a renaissance of Chinese culture. A Chinese soup and noodle dish known for its distinctive smell has become a hit after being featured in a video.
His videos also offer a distraction from the realities of rural China, which is poorer and older than the country's bustling cities.
Li rose to international prominence during the pandemic, when China's relations with the West began to deteriorate. Locked at home, millions of people abroad were fascinated by his videos. The containment measures imposed in China, although severe and radical, have been widely applied in cities.
As Li's brand flourished, she began selling foods and sauces under her name on Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao. In 2020, local media reported that sales of its products exceeded 1.6 billion yuan ($220 million; £172 million).
As of 2021, she has become the most popular Chinese-language vlogger on YouTube, where she has over 20 million followers. An additional three million people follow her on TikTok.
On Tuesday, she announced her comeback with a 14-minute video on all her social media accounts, including Chinese platforms Weibo, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, as well as YouTube and TikTok.
The video, which shows her making a wardrobe for her grandmother using the traditional lacquering technique, has been viewed more than 10 million times on YouTube and more than three million times on TikTok.
“I missed you a lot,” she told her fans in a message.
And they felt the same way: “When the world needed her most, she came back. Welcome back,” read one popular YouTube comment.
Another comment liked more than 13,000 times on Weibo said: “We need the slow Li Ziqi in this era of information explosion. »
“Has anyone else literally cried tears of joy?” another comment said. “I'm so happy to see his grandmother is doing so well! So happy to see you again.”
